Reaching Out

Robert Allen

January 7, 2024

                                The Embassy, San Antonio

                                                January 31, 2009

The theater emptied quickly while the end

credits rolled. In the dark I noticed another

person sitting alone, who also appeared to be

staying for the “whole thing,” and I moved

closer, asking “Why are we still here?”

She said she was on a mission to see all

the Oscar nominees this year. She did not

subscribe to the theory that there is already

enough sadness in the world and therefore

one should not add to it by watching

or making more sad movies. She said

she liked movies with depth and substance,

movies which depict characters whose

actions have consequences, and reveal

the consequences of those actions, because

that is the way life is. She liked movies

which are true to life, complicated the way

life is complicated. “Life has consequences.”

I like this person, I thought, and I asked her

about one specific scene in the final third

of the movie, where the two leads sit opposite

each other across a prison table and the woman

reaches out and touches the man’s hand:

“Did she want to resume their relationship?”

“No,” my new acquaintance said. “She

wanted him to go away, and she was making

sure of it.” When the woman in the movie

commits suicide, I had believed she was

distraught over his rejection of her, again,

after all those years. But the woman in the

theater had a different interpretation. “She

was planning to commit suicide, even before

he came to visit her.” When the credits came

to an end, this woman, once a stranger,

told me she enjoyed our talk. Then she rose

and walked out of my life, back into hers.

“It’s been six hours,” my wife said. “Where

have you been?” “I saw a movie, a downer.

You would not have liked it. But I met

another person who did.” “Oh?” she asked.

“Yes, I actually spoke to a stranger. One

who likes movies that make her sad.” “Get

her name?” “No.” “Was she pretty?” “It was

dark.” She looked me squarely in the eyes.

“Cold leftovers for you tonight, my friend.”

Robert Allen is retired and lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and two cats. He has poems in Voices de la Luna, the discontinued Texas Poetry Calendar, and TPA. He loves cardio-boxing workouts, hates to throw things away, and facilitates Gemini Ink's in-person Open Writer's Lab.

Double Feature

Chris Ellery

September 17, 2023

On Saturday afternoons

their mother dropped the brothers off 

at the old Joy Theater.

Its ratty seats and sticky floors,

its dirty screen flickering in the dark 

with silvery shades

of myth.

With popcorn and soda, 

the boys consumed in utter joy 

the thrill of how the west was won

and lost. 

War paint, wagon trains, flaming arrows, 

scalped settlers, injun-killing cowboys,

the brave Cavalry martyred on their horses, 

gunfights and rough law, 

whiskey, saloon girls, 

greasy cards and derringers, 

railroad tycoons, cattle barons, undertakers,

the town under siege, 

and always

the white-hatted rescue 

of fledgling civilization—

its splintery boardwalk, its muddy street.

On Sunday mornings 

the boys returned to the Joy, 

rented for an hour

to a tiny flock of earnest Christians.

There kind, old Mrs. Rayburn

taught the boys to turn the other cheek, 

to love their enemies, 

to welcome persecution, 

to heal the sick, cast out demons, raise the dead,

and above all else 

to know

down to the rock bottom of their souls 

that God is Love

and Love is All

in all. 

Chris Ellery is a retired professor of English from Angelo State University, where he taught classes in film criticism and American cinema.  His most recent collection of poems is Canticles of the Body. 

The Wizard of Rusk Avenue: 1923 - 1971

Suzanne Morris

September 10, 2023

When I was a child

I watched from my mother’s knee as

The Wizard of Oz cast its spell,

all 2500 seats filled in the

opulent Houston Majestic:

crown jewel of Rusk Avenue

since 1923.

Daddy, Mama, my sister and me

dressed in our Sunday best

sat high up under the

atmospheric sky– 

reputed to be the

first of its kind–with

rising moon, twinkling stars, and

wispy clouds scrolling by.

By then, the gilt-encrusted

proscenium arch, interlacing

an Italian Renaissance garden

with golden pergola, trailing vines,

and Roman statuary

had lowered the final curtain on

big-time Vaudeville acts

in deference to the silver screen,

the towering pipe organ that 

once brought the house down

retiring, mute, in the corner.

For most of the film I was

transported by

Dorothy’s operatic voice, and

magic ruby slippers.

But then, near the end

I screamed in fright when

the Wicked Witch–her

evil powers suddenly doused– 

melted away

into nothing.

Though the storied house stood

for two decades more

her bewitching powers

subsided:

her movie screen looked

blankly on as

her star-spangled night sky

flickered out

and her golden proscenium

grew tarnished.

The fatal blow

of the wrecking ball

reduced the Majestic

to rubble.

But through the magical lens

of my memory it seems she

melted away

into nothing.

Suzanne Morris is a novelist and poet.  She has contributed to several poetry anthologies, including Lone Star Poetry (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022).  Her poems have appeared as well in The Texas Poetry Assignment, The New Verse News, Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Pine Cone Review, and Emblazoned Soul Review.  A native Texan, Ms. Morris resides in Cherokee County.

Two Palaces

Vincent Hostak

September 3, 2023

Live out your life in another’s light?

Some would on a Sunday morning

where the soundtrack’s a long lingering postlude.

A bishop clasps some trembling hands 

for a short spell 

and the believers shuffle into chaste sunlight.

The matinee’s another calling

Starlight trapped inside a lamphouse

the first reel trawls over the sound drum, clacking

like a freight line over cross grades

just blocks away—

melodies the projectionist alone can hear.

On the palace Uptown’s two dark days

the front-of-house is ghostly still,

mice nurse the canvas bags of dry sweet corn.

But soon a call: “Retreat stage left”

curtains part, make

way for a block-wide head to cross the chalk-faced screen.

Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes & produces the podcast: Crossings-the Refugee Experience in America.

Majestic Afternoons

Clarence Wolfshohl

August 27, 2023

We would go in with the sun

Blaring its San Antonio summer

And find it was night with stars

Filling the dome of sky

And flashing from the screen.

All was pitch dark or shadowed

Or, one time, spotlighted on stage,

The magician Blackstone spirited

Things into air and from the air.

When the movies or shows

Were over and we’d stream

Outside to await our bus on the street,

The glare of afternoon sun

Dazzled our eyes and surprised

Our circadian rhythms back into sync

With the real stars and heavenly spheres.

Clarence Wolfshohl is professor emeritus at William Woods University.  Since his first publication in The Road Apple Review, he has been active in the small press as writer and publisher for over fifty years, publishing poetry and non-fiction in many journals, both print and online, including New Texas, San Pedro River Review, Agave, Cape Rock, and New Letters.  Among his publications are the e-chapbook Scattering Ashes (Virtual Artists Collective, 2016), the chapbook Holy Toledo (El Grito del Lobo Press, 2017), Queries and Wonderments (El Grito del Lobo Press, 2017), and Armadillos & Groundhogs (2019). 

I Rode With John Wayne

Jeanie Sanders

August 20, 2023

Traveling into the movie World

with my hero, John Wayne, my red boots

and black cowboy hat feed yearnings

for Majestic barren landscapes.

through the beauty of desolation.

Anticipation is like a dryness in my throat

as I join John on a rise above Palo Duro Canyon

searching any train for twisted humanity.

How beautifully straight John sits

confident on his tooled saddle.

He raises his callous cowboy hand

and we spur our horses and move out

into the Sunset of the West.

On the trail of Righteousness we always

win.  For we are the “good guys.”

John and I never think about the bloody mess

we create and leave to the buzzards to clean up.

Because it’s just us, on the next red bluff, arroyo, 

or canyon, John Wayne and I.

Jeanie Sanders is a poet and collage artist.  Her poems have been published in the Texas Observer, Voices de la Luna, The San Antonio Express News, La Voz de Esperanza, and several anthologies. She is a member of the Sun Poets of San Antonio and the Alamo Area Poets of Texas. Her new book is titled, The Book of the Dead.

Movies and More Movies

Milton Jordan

August 13, 2023

That summer, we left our small East Texas town,

a few retail stores strung out along State Street,

our one movie house bearing that street’s name 

anchoring its west end, showing second run 

features and standard Saturday B westerns 

with an ongoing cliff-hanger serial

demanding our weekly return,

and moved to the refinery studded 

suburban sprawl of the Gulf Coast with the Bay

and Palace theaters on Texas Avenue 

featuring first-run films, leaving reruns

westerns and those weekly cliff-hangers

to the Texan, where I spent most Saturdays 

if not at the Arcadia across town.

Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. He co-edited the first Texas Poetry Assignment anthology, Lone Star Poetry, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022.